I have been taking photographs since I was about 14 years old. I started with a really old, folding, bellows, black and white camera, and over the years graduated to more and more sophisticated cameras. By the time I was in my twenties, I knew almost everything there was to know about taking pictures, developing film, making enlargements, f-stops, depth of field, rules of thirds, you name it. And I owned hundreds of dollars worth of cameras and other related junk. But to be brutally honest, my pictures were not that great because — well, read on.
Years went by and my interest in photography took a back seat to getting an education, earning a living and paying the rent. It wasn’t until I was in my late forties that I rediscovered photography. By then I had forgotten most of what I knew, plus the technology had improved to include zoom lenses, single lens reflex cameras and affordable color film. But it was also then that I discovered that I “had an eye” for what made a good picture. To put it another way, I knew much less about the technology but the artistic aspects of photography and art had mysteriously come to me. Now my pictures were great (well some of them were) and before long I was exhibiting my work in group and one-man shows. I was confident that another Ansel Adams had been born.
Unfortunately, my dreams of becoming world famous and selling my photographs for hundreds of dollars each just never materialized. And a lot more years went by.
Now here is where my philosophy of photography comes in. Back when I was doing exhibition quality work I used to compare my photography with the work of artists who were painting with water colors, oils, pastels, etc. While it would take them hours or days or even more to produce a work, I could do the same thing in a little as 1/1000th of a second. But then I realized that in my case, I had the problem of having to compose my pictures around that annoying telephone pole or the inconvenient late-model automobile parked next to that interesting old barn while the painter had the luxury of simply ignoring those distracting elements. In a way — at least to my way of thinking — that put me on a somewhat level playing field with the media artists. Taking a well-composed picture at 1/1000th of a second took as much talent as spending hours on a water color or oil painting. I should add here that I would frequently go on a “photo shoot” and only take three or four pictures in an entire day. I was composing my pictures in my camera viewfinder and I only shot what I thought would make a good picture.
Then suddenly — or so it seemed to me — we were in something called the age of digital photography and all my equipment was obsolete, along with whatever I remembered from my film days. Now it was time to spend a lot more money to buy a digital camera and learn how to use it, and to navigate my way through the intricacies of digital software. So I signed up for some digital photography classes and I learned a lot.
But I also discovered there was a new digital photography “philosophy” that says, “Shoot, shoot, shoot, and surely one of your pictures will be good enough to keep.” That’s like going duck hunting with a machine gun and claiming you’re a marksman when you get one duck.
And don’t get me started on “shoot, shoot, shoot, and you can fix it in Photoshop.”
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. He can be reached at pburri@west.net.